Transforming Specialty Practice - The Patient-Centered Medical Neighborhood

Many patient-centered medical home (PCMH) initiatives wrestle with building effective partnerships with specialty practices that aren't designed to support collaboration. One solution is the specialty analogue to the PCMH: the patient-centered specialty practice. The patient-centered medical home (PCMH) is a well accepted primary care delivery vehicle in the United States.(1) The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) has recognized nearly 27,000 clinicians at more than 5000 sites throughout the country in its PCMH program. State and private payers have their own certification criteria. As PCMH efforts have spread and met with mixed success, some observers have noted that refurbishing primary care is probably necessary but not sufficient for addressing the fragmentation of care and underlying cost growth. Primary care services themselves account for only 6% of total health care spending. Moreover, attempts to ...